PCWorld February 2022

Microsoft has been on a gaming acquisition tear for the last few years, hoping to give the edge to its Xbox and Game Pass platforms as Sony’s PlayStation continues to dominate with exclusive titles. The company previously purchased such notable companies as ZeniMax (aka Bethesda), Minecraft developer Mojang, Id, Obsidian, Ninja Theory, Rare, Double Fine, and 343 Industries. But the computer giant’s next purchase is so big it might shake the foundations of the gaming industry: Activision Blizzard. The news comes as an official announcement from Microsoft itself, emblazoned with its prospective acquisition’s biggest game series like World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, and Candy Crush. The acquisition is valued at $68.7 billion with Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard stock shares at $95 each. The deal is being given a full media…

AMD, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm: CES always ushers in a flood of chip news that sets the stage for the year to come, and CES 2022 has been no different. Two broad themes stand out: a concerted effort by AMD and Nvidia to develop low-end GPUs that (hopefully) will be widely available, and the introduction of next-gen CPU platforms by both AMD and Intel. Here’s all of PCWorld’s coverage, filed from our homes while CES limped on. AMD’S RX 6000S, RX6850M GPUS In my mind, one of the most impressive announcements of CES was the Acer Predator Triton 500 SE, precisely because of what it hoped to accomplish: a platform for both work and play. I couldn’t help but view AMD’s new mobile GPUs through the same lens: GPUs designed for ultraportable laptops that…

Warriors of the Empire, hear me! While my pink blood longs for the battlefield as much as that of any of my Klingon brothers and sisters, the time has come to admit that our alliance with the weaklings in the Federation does have some fringe benefits. Not only have we regained access to classic texts from that most celebrated Klingon storyteller, Shakespeare, we now have a means of preserving our written heritage for humans. LibreOffice, a Federation means of processing written words, will soon support the glorious Klingon language. Qapla‘! Star Trek’s fictional species of space Vikings have technically had their own language since The Trouble with Tribbles way back in the original TV series, but the film series started expanding Klingon into a semi-functional language during the 1980s. With a…

CES 2022 is typically the single most important media event for the PC laptop industry. This year proved no different despite the sudden and unexpected shift to a largely virtually show (the major chipmakers all stayed remote, as did most laptop manufacturers). In fact, 2022 is shaping up to be an excellent year for Windows laptops. New CPUs and GPUs from AMD, Nvidia, and Intel promise to send laptop performance to the moon—and that’s just the start. Here’s 5 top laptop trends from CES 2022 that simply can’t be ignored. Expect to see some of these notebooks cracking our list of the best laptops sooner than later. 1. LAPTOPS GROW IN POWER (AND POWER CONSUMPTION) The PC laptop world was focused on large, heavy, and expensive laptops at CES 2022. While AMD, Intel, and…

If you’re planning on using a newer Intel processor in your next media center PC build, a combination of security precautions and digital rights management might just have you singing the Blu-ray blues. Intel is dropping support for the software guard extension feature in 11th- and 12th-gen Core processors, which breaks DRM functionality for the latest 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray discs and player software. The end result: Those fancy movies will now play back in a rather pedestrian 1080p resolution. As reported in Bleeping Computer, there’s no intentional malice in this move. Intel is depreciating the SGX functionality that’s been present in Core processors since Skylake (2015) because of a series of attacks made by security researchers, who found it an easy vector for getting through CPU defenses. So doing without…

CES sets trends in the PC market for the year to come. This year, sustainability became an area of focus, with multiple PC makers—and, of course, companies in other industries—announcing sustainability goals and promising to use more recycled materials in new devices. But to what end? Do PC makers have anything new to say on sustainability, and is there really a difference between companies? I dove into a pile of CES announcements and annual corporate responsibility reports to find out. WHO HAD ANNOUNCEMENTS? Most PC makers had something to say on sustainability during CES 2022, but Dell (which technically didn’t attend CES and hosted its own digital event) had the best reveal. The Concept Luna prototype is Dell’s attempt to pair sustainable, repairable design with the thin-and-light appeal of XPS laptops. Luna would…